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How to Deal with Duplicate Photos on Your Hard Drive

The problem of duplicate files is a common one across every computer. Duplicate files also tend to plague storage media like flash drives and external hard drives. However, the challenge posed by duplicate photos is the most difficult. This often happens as there is very little that separates two identical looking photographs. You can very well blame this on digital photography (‘Burst Mode’ is one of the biggest culprits here leaving you with many near-identical images).

So it is quite likely that your hard disk drive contains an original, unedited version of a picture as well as its smaller sized edited version. So if you intend to correct this mess but can’t spare enough time to do so, the ‘Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder’ application is just about right for you.

A Title Befitting its Features

Let’s face it, there is no dearth of applications out there that help you reduce the amount of duplicate content on your hard drive. However, ‘Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder’ is unique in many ways. For starters, the application is free, and this certainly does not have any adverse effect in the way it differentiates between thorough duplicates and highly similar photos.

You can use either the portable version of this program or the fully installable one. The advantage with the former is you can run it directly from your hard drive, flash drive or even an external hard drive. This makes it useful in case you have stored your photos on multiple media.

Getting the Program to Work

Once you start up ‘Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder’, you must drag the folders in which you have stored the photos towards the window’s top half. After doing this, you need to hit the button that reads ‘Start Search’. Although the scanning time depends upon the size of your photo collection, the application can take anywhere between 20-30 minutes to browse through 10,000 strong photo collection/folder.

Once the application is done with scanning all the folders specified by you, it presents all the duplicate photos it has managed to identify. For further actions, you can click on any pair of two photos. Both these photos are then loaded next to each other.

The program denotes the degree of similarity between the two photos using a percentage figure. For instance, a percentage figure of 100 indicates that the two photos are duplicates; and not just similar versions. As the percentage figure gets lower, the program indicates that the photos might have more than just a few differences.

The program is also capable of identifying same pictures but of different sizes, photos that have undergone minor adjustments and even lightly cropped photos. Below every displayed photo, details of the file, size and resolution are included. You can use the trash icon to chuck all the duplicates from your collection.